The Death of Muzluk
by draylon
Summary: In this story Muzluk, an original character Uruk-hai Orc, dies. It’s a sequel to the stories “Warg Pit One Hundred and Thirteen” and “The Leader of the Pack.” It contains profanity and a bit of graphic violence and some fairly unlikely element


Author's explanation: the apparently random insertion of a '(1)' and a '(2)' in the following text refer to a couple of footnotes that are listed at the end of the story.

**The Death of Muzluk**

"You can get the fuck away from me," snarled Muzluk. "You. Can get – the fuck – oh –" he snagged a fold of the flesh on the inside of his cheek between his fangs and bit down on it, hard as he could. The effort of trying to turn round, to see who he was speaking to had made whatever it was that was wrong with the inside of his chest much, much worse. Blood, warm, iron-tasting and salty, pooled up around his back teeth. He swallowed it down quickly. Muzluk was an Orc, and under other circumstances, he probably would have enjoyed it.

Ignoring Muzluk's desperate warning, the footsteps he'd heard came closer, rustling, as whatever it was that was approaching picked its way towards him, down the steep bank. Almost twelve hours earlier, Muzluk had rolled down that slope, right to the bottom the little ravine he was now lying in. Landing on his front, at first he'd been too dazed from the pain of his fall, and later too weak from loss of blood, even to try get to his feet. But he was still terribly, terribly thirsty. When he'd seen the line of brush that followed the gully, showing as a darker gash against the endless yellow plains of standing hay, Muzluk had thought that the trees might signal a stream or watercourse, and he had used up the last of his strength, making for it. He'd hoped there would be water. And there had been, a dirty little trickle of it, but after his first mouthful, the mingled taste of the mud and rotting leaves, and the blood and all the other things that had been shed in it had turned Muzluk's stomach over, and he'd vomited helplessly, again and again, until his cramping insides were emptied completely. Now, even that sluggish, half-hearted dribble of water had slowed to nothing at all. The mud round the scant, stagnating pools left in the bottom of the gully was drying and cracking quickly, in the late summer heat.

The long rays of the evening sun slanted through the stunted, scrubby trees, casting the shadow of whoever was making their way down into the gully well ahead of its owner. The shadow cast itself fully over Muzluk. The incomer was very close.

Muzluk tried for the knife he had hidden down the side of his right boot. But Muzluk's right arm was hanging uselessly - hanging off, it felt like, and it had been all he could do to tie it closed and slow the bleeding, just so that he could prolong his useless, worthless life, for just the smallest while longer. He'd had tie his right arm so tightly that even if he had been able to get the tourniquet off, so many hours had passed by now that he'd most likely lose the limb in any case. Not that there was much point in thinking about it, because the ties he'd applied weren't ever going to be coming off. Muzluk was a realist; circumstances had forced him to be one, and he had no illusions whatsoever about his chances of making it off this battlefield alive.

And so Muzluk, grabbing with his left hand at the wicked, black-bladed knife that rested in his right-hand boot was too slow. Perhaps he always would have been too slow, even without the pain, and his heavy armour, or even with two good hands. The stranger – with a great flash of blindingly white light, drove him back. His staff smacked down on Muzluk's left hand, fixing where it lay.

It was a Wizard, Muzluk realized, and he would have cried, sobbing out in despair if he could have done, or maybe he'd even have tried laughing if his ribs hadn't hurt so dreadfully much; laughing out loud in pitch, black humour. Anything, as a final statement, a last acknowledgement, here at the end of all things, of invariable, cursedly awful, rotten, Uruk-ish, bad, bad luck.

A bleedin' Wizard, here in front of him, large as life. Muzluk realised that he wasn't even going to get to die in peace.

The Wizard's staff moved slightly on his arm, and to his horror, Muzluk couldn't help but make a desperate little noise, which escaped him, high up in the back of his throat. It was only that he knew from before what Wizards could do with their staves. He'd come to find that out for himself from his Master, who was also a Wizard, and now Muzluk knew that lesson very well. Oh, yes.

The blunt end of this Wizard's staff was enclosed in a finely-worked tracery, made up of pairs of interconnected, arching lines. For all that, the staff, where it was resting on Muzluk's arm – his good arm - felt surprisingly heavy.

The Wizard's staff was dead intricate - and painful-looking, Muzluk thought, for he had no doubts at all about where it was going to be connecting with next. He pressed his forehead down into the filth he was lying in, gritting his teeth together. Muzluk hoped it took the Wizard forever, trying to get Uruk blood out of the carvings on that poxy, fancy, snow-white staff of his. He gritted his teeth together and waited for it.

The blow Muzluk was expecting did not fall. Instead, the Wizard's staff was drawn back from his arm, and then was set aside entirely, as its owner leaned it upright in the fork of one of twisted little trees nearby. Returning to Muzluk, the Wizard stooped down, and turned him over, with some care, so that he was lying on his back. Then, grasping him under his arms, the Wizard hauled Muzluk round so that his head no longer rested downhill from his feet. Immediately, the pain in Muzluk's chest lessened significantly, and breathing in and out became much less of an effort for him. Muzluk found that his shoulders had been placed on a cool bank of soft moss, and he rested back against it for a moment.

The Wizard retreated a few steps back from Muzluk, then sat down, bringing himself directly into his line of sight. Muzluk, who was having difficulty in moving and turning his head, had not been able to get a proper look at him before.

"Well met, Master Uruk," the Wizard said.

He looked a bit like Sharkey, this geezer did, thought Muzluk, dazedly, and he shivered to see it. Sharkey was the Wizard who owned Muzluk, and all Muzluk's comrades; he owned them all body and soul, and he had not been a particularly kind or forgiving Master. This fellow looked the same as Sharkey in the sense that he was a Wizard, and wore white robes, and he was as old as the hills. Even his pale, poker-straight hair was the same. The only thing Muzluk could see lacking was the malevolent look of utter insanity that Sharkey always had in the back of his eyes, the look that told you the old man was as crazy, and dangerous, as an open basket of snakes. This Wizard had more of a kind of a – benevolent, twinkling aura to him. He seemed to be smiling and twinkling benevolently at Muzluk, right now.

Muzluk averted his gaze immediately, out of habit. It is never a good sign when a Wizard begins paying too much attention to you.

That was another thing; the way this Wizard was acting was way-off, too. Sharkey would never have helped a wounded Uruk who was lying face-down in the mud at his feet: Sharkey was much too keen on Uruk-ish mud-grovelling and self-abasement for that. So if this geezer wasn't even going to bother playing with Muzluk, and didn't want to spend some time tormenting him beforehand, then they might as well get on with it. Faced with the immediate reality of his own death, the head-long rush of confidence that had suffused Muzluk, hours earlier during the battle returned to him.

'Kill me if you're going to do it!" roared Muzluk. Fey and fell he was, there in the evening sunlight. "I fucking dare you!"

"Kill you?" the White Wizard said. "Oh no. I'm not here to do that. I want to talk to you."

Muzluk blinked at him in confusion. What could there be to talk about?

"That looks to me like an Uruk-bite," the Sharkey look-alike said. He indicated the terrible, raking wound that had laid Muzluk's right arm open from his forearm to his shoulder.

"Yes," said Muzluk, warily, "it is."

Muzluk started at a loud crashing noise that suddenly came from the trees behind the Wizard. It sounded as if some very large animal was trying to push its way through the brush, towards them. A moment later, the creature revealed itself to be a big, pale horse. The horse – the Wizard's horse, because obviously, such a decrepit old geezer couldn't have made it all the way out here if he hadn't been on a horse - looked like, in fact it definitely was, an equine-fancier's wet-dream. Its white coat shone in the evening sunlight, and as it tossed its head, the beautiful threads of its long, flowing mane spun out around it, like gossamer on a summer's morning.

Muzluk, however, was not impressed by any of this, because he did not much care for horses. They had a very strong tendency for rearing up during battles and then doing their best to trample people like him to death. He was glad that this one did not seem to be able to get much closer.

"Is that – your horse," asked Muzluk, hesitantly. He had never spoken to a Wizard, directly, before.

"Yes. It is." A pained expression passed fleetingly over the old man's face, perhaps because his conversation with Muzluk was not proceeding quite as he had planned it. "Though I did not come all this way to talk about that," he added, under his breath.

"I came on account of the boy," the Wizard said, decisively.

Muzluk groaned aloud. This was all he blinkin' well needed. Just perfect. "What boy?" he growled, under his breath.

"I think you know what boy," Sharkey Mark Two said. "He was most insistent. And, I, I was interested. In what he told me."

Muzluk stared stubbornly at the ground, refusing to answer. He very much did not want to talk about this.

"The boy told me," said the Wizard, "that during the Siege of the Hornburg Gate, one of Saruman's Uruk-hai, midst' a night of battle terror, the bodies of his fallen comrades all around, paused, to –"

"S'probably not what you're thinking," Muzluk interrupted, beside himself with painful embarrassment. Just as well he was on his last legs; if not he'd be absolutely guaranteed to never live this one down.

"– he said the Uruk rescued -" the Wizard continued smoothly, but was immediately interrupted again.

"He badly misread the situation," muttered Muzluk.

"The boy said the Uruk challenged his own commanding officer, –"

"That wasn't on his account!" Muzluk added, quickly.

"– fighting him, and saving the boy's –"

"He just got in the way, all right?" Muzluk cried, in desperation. "He got between me and the other bloke, that's all. I swear I was going to eat him, after."

"Why did you help him climb back up the wall, then? He saw you from up there, you know, making your way towards this place. He saw you leave the battle early. He said he thought you might have survived."

Muzluk had no answer for that.

"What made you help him?" The Wizard insisted, very patiently.

"What's it to you, Grandad?" snarled Muzluk. Wizard or not, he'd had about enough of this.

"All things are altered, in their time," the Old Man said. "Long-held belief and truth must pass and be replaced, if they prove false. It has always been so, and rightly. 'Lest one good custom should inherit the world."

Muzluk, however, had little or no experience in understanding such flowery rhetoric. "Do what?" he said.

"The Elder Races are passing from Middle Earth," the Wizard told him, shortly. "The ways of Men are changing. And I wonder if perhaps, even your kind, Master Uruk, may change, too."

Muzluk didn't reply. He genuinely didn't know why he'd bothered to boost the Rohirrim kid back up to safety, 'stead of just killing him, like anyone else. It was just that once he'd faced off Ghazhack, ostensibly over the sprog, and had accidentally saved its life in the process, that sort of made the boy Muzluk's, well, not responsibility, exactly, but somehow it seemed like he couldn't go ahead and finish things off. He just couldn't.

"He was – he was just so fucking small," Muzluk muttered, by way of explanation. The Wizard eyed him keenly but did not say anything. After a moment's hesitation, Muzluk, haltingly, began to expand upon his story.

The ebb and flow of the tides of the battle, running through a long night of siege and entrenchment at Helm's Deep, had brought the remains of Muzluk's company, in a time of relative inaction and quiet, close up against the Deeping Wall. The twenty foot high barricade ran side to side, from sheer cliff face to cliff face, bisecting the mountain coomb that was the Deep proper. The people of Rohan had chosen for themselves a near-impregnable position behind the Wall, or so they'd thought, stoppering themselves securely into their bolt-hole amid the mountains, but once the outermost defences had fallen, they'd been caught there, like rats in a trap. The first onslaught against them had involved repeated waves of follow-up and attack, from the fore-running regiments of Sharkey's Uruk army. This attack had been focussed entirely on the wall itself, but had been little more than a diversionary tactic, set up mainly to distract the attentions of the Rohirrim soldiers from the focus of the coming assault. Under cover provided by the actions directed at the Wall, a smaller team of Uruk-hai Berserkers had set a massive charge of explosive chemicals inside a culvert that ran directly beneath the main defences. The subsequent detonation of Sharkey's blasting fire had created a breach in the outer Wall, through which hundreds of troops of the Isengard Army had flowed, whilst many others scaled it, using rope ladders topped with grappling hooks, breaching the weakened Rohirrim line in many places simultaneously.

From the outermost base of the ramparts, the primary action of the battle had quickly shifted inside the Deeping Coomb itself, and the main body of Sharkey's Uruk battleforce were now tackling the desperate defenders in smaller, hand-to-hand skirmishes on the far side of the wall, and in the fortifications on the other side. The remains of Muzluk's company, comprised as far as he was aware – only Muzluk himself. Initially, his troop had been slightly nearer the battlefront than the rearguard of the attack - though really, there had not been much in it. They had effectively been wedged, in a crush of forward-pressing motion, somewhere in the middle of the Uruk army, perhaps one or two divisions back from the vanguard of the attack.

It had begun to rain, in solid, soaking sheets, just before the first forward charge had sounded, and in the expectant, waiting silence, Bur-kesh, who'd been several lines in front of Muzluk, had made a joke about it, and everyone in their troop had laughed. Bur-kesh hadn't exactly been a particular friend of Muzluk's; there'd been no chance for that. But more than likely, under different circumstances, he would have been, and Muzluk had been – although he would not have used the word, because he did not know it –fonder, of Bur-kesh, than he'd ever been of anyone else.

When the first of the Berserkers' charges had broken through, a great section of the Deeping Wall had been blown sky-high under Sharkey's black blasting fire. The mighty, hewn stone blocks, each almost a full arms' span across, had been tossed into the air as easily as a player's turn in a game of knuckle-bones, and then they had come back down, most of them right in the middle of the Isengard ranks. Muzluk's company had been scattered apart directly by one of the falling blocks, and Bur-kesh – poor Bur-kesh – had been flattened outright. A finer hail of airborne masonry had killed several others, and Muzluk himself had been knocked unconscious by a fragment that was fully as large as his doubled fists. It had caught him a glancing blow on the forehead, or else it would surely have finished him, and his helm – which had saved him – had been so badly caved in by the impact as to no longer even be wearable. On reviving back on the battlefield, he'd cast it off before making for the Wall. It would have been a good idea, Muzluk thought, as he made his advance, for Sharkey to have ensured that the Wall would be blown inwards rather than directly out onto his own troops, but this particular nuance of master-plan seemed to have escaped him. Of course the Wizard had considered this, Muzluk realised. He had simply written the casualties off as acceptable losses. In the end, they were none of them any more important than that.

Having finally arrived near the foot of the battlements, the ragged order had come to Muzluk: all Isengard soldiers remaining outside the Deeping Wall were to stay where they were, securing the area, and searching for and destroying any human survivors.

And now Muzluk had found one. It was a tiny, little, snot-nosed, human sprog, and it was huddled in amongst a pile of jumbled blocks, a short distance from the base of the Wall. Bug-eyed with terror, it was, and it had pissed in its pants, quite some time earlier, by the smell of it. Muzluk was surprised no one had sniffed it out already; it positively reeked of fear. It must have taken quite a tumble down from the battlements, because it was bruised all down one side, but Muzluk could smell nothing worse than that wrong with it, inside or out - the jammy little bleeder. Muzluk turned his back on it in disgust. This was what Sharkey's crack fighting force had come to do battle with, was it? Mewling sprogs, and tired old men. This was what poor old Kajuk and Loguz and Gulnak and all the rest of them had fought for and died over, was it? Most of them had been mown down like meadow hay in a volley of filthy, Elvish (1) arrows, with never even a chance at hand to hand combat. Packed so tight, shoulder to shoulder, braced against their comrades they'd been, that they hadn't some of them even fallen down, long after they were dead. That had been the Wizard's plan, though, hadn't it? Sheer weight of Uruk-ish numbers, pitted against a near-impregnable position. They didn't any of them matter, not one of them. The task they had been sent to accomplish; that was all.

The battlefield, especially around the base of the Wall, was strewn with corpses. Here and there were dead Men, defenders from the Rohirrim side, but overwhelmingly the casualties had been culled from Uruk-ish ranks. They lay literally in drifts, several Uruks high, their numbers having been decimated(2), time and again, since the first assault. Muzluk thought he glimpsed faces he recognised among the fallen, but there were many, many more that he didn't. Standing there among the ranks of the nameless dead, the realisation came to Muzluk, that more than likely, he himself would not survive. And at that moment, the fear he had always lived with – of pain, of punishment, of death – the fear that had forever kept him cowed and controlled, left him completely. He had always served his Master through fear, and yet he should have always known that in the end, his life would amount to no more than this. Nothing he had done had made any, lasting difference. If his ending had been inevitable, then surely, there had been no real reason for fear.

Another Uruk was rapidly approaching, coming towards Muzluk through the ground-mist and gloom. "Muzluk? Is that you?" the other's voice called. The sound of it immediately set Muzluk's teeth on edge. It just ruddy well would be, wouldn't it. Everybody else in the pack lying dead or smashed to smithereens except Muzluk, and of course the only other survivor would have to turn out to be his company's leader – Ghazhack. Muzluk squared his shoulders, and turned to meet him.

Something about the way Muzluk was carrying himself looked different to Ghazhack, as he made his way closer. Suddenly, Ghazhack felt himself wishing that there were a couple, or maybe more, of his lieutenants still hanging around, somewhere near by. Not that he felt he really needed back-up. But.

"You got one, brother!" Ghazhack called, indicating the human boy who was still cowering behind Muzluk, in amongst the rubble. Ghazhack's tone of comradely bonhomie was just a little overdone, and Ghazhack and Muzluk noted it, both.

"He's a small one, but that's just about your mark, isn't it?" Ghazhack said, coming closer. He made as if to nudge Muzluk in the ribs, in a hearty, bantering fashion. Muzluk resolutely stepped away from him, avoiding the contact.

"Small – huuurrh! It suits you," repeated Ghazhack.

Muzluk did not laugh politely. Instead he feinted at Ghazhack, scowling at him, with a deep growl rumbling in his chest. Ghazhack fell back doubtfully, quite amazed.

"You're challenging me over it?" Ghazhack exclaimed. "You're challenging your leader? Brother?" he added, as a quick afterthought. Not liking the way Muzluk was staring at him one bit, he backed down. "Take the kill - you've earned it. Then we'll share him, you and me – ha?"

"Which end d'you want to start with?" said Muzluk.

From time to time, Ghazhack had found it necessary to remind Muzluk of Muzluk's place in the scheme of things, within their pack. Ghazhack felt that it was a duty that all pack-leaders had to do, to keep order, especially if they found themselves dealing with difficult bastards, like Muzluk. And what if Ghazhack had enjoyed the act of dominating Muzluk rather too much? It wouldn't have been half so much fun for Ghazhack if Muzluk hadn't put up such a struggle against his authority, and kicked at his traces, and acted up so much, as he had done, in the past. But he'd taken the bit in the end, hadn't he? The last few times, Muzluk had been lying down and taking whatever came to him. So much so that Ghazhack had been quite certain that at last, ultimately, Muzluk had come to accept the way things were. Ghazhack was sure he'd had Muzluk intimidated, and browbeaten, and humiliated so often, that in the end, Muzluk had had no choice but to find himself broken by it. And of course Ghazhack had assumed that Muzluk had finally been beaten; he'd truly believed it. But now as they stood there, squaring off, one against the other, it was becoming terribly clear to Ghazhack that Muzluk - well, Muzluk, just, hadn't.

"I - didn't hear you," Ghazhack said, foolishly. "Hah?"

"I said," Muzluk replied, enunciating with difficulty, because of the rising snarl he couldn't keep out his voice, "which end, would you, Ghazhack, like to start at. Brother."

Ghazhack stared at him. Muzluk was challenging him. He couldn't believe it.

The pelting rain had started up again, and Muzluk raised his voice, to shout above the sizzling hiss of raindrops. "I expect you'd like me to say that in a louder voice, Ghazhack, would you –"

Without warning, Ghazhack charged at him. Muzluk, who'd been expecting it managed to side-step quickly, turning sideways, and caught the main force of Ghazhack's attack in his right shoulder rather than in the throat. As Muzluk staggered under Ghazhack's weight, Ghazhack tore the mouthful of muscle he'd caught hold of clean out and spat it away, and slashed at Muzluk with his fangs and his claws, ripping in to him wherever he could reach. He was using his superior body weight to wrestle Muzluk to the ground, as he had often done, in the past, but this time, when Muzluk was down, Ghazhack would kill him.

Muzluk tried to brace himself upright but his feet were slipping under him in the rain-slick mud. Unable to retain his footing, he stopped trying to resist Ghazhack's movement, and let himself lean back in the same direction that Ghazhack was pushing instead, at the same time kicking out at the other Uruk's legs, to try to topple him down. The abrupt change in resistance caused Ghazhack to overbalance and he fell forwards, heavily down on top of Muzluk. Muzluk clung to him grimly, preventing him from getting up.

Twisting desperately under Ghazhack, Muzluk wriggled into position, and managed to lock his arms around Ghazhack's shoulders. He pinned Ghazhack's arms to his sides, using his own weight to keep Ghazhack from rising, and closed his teeth round the larger Uruk's windpipe. Biting harder, in a suffocating grip, Muzluk crunched through brittle rings of cartilage and sinew. Ghazhack clawed at Muzluk's sides, struggling ineffectually, his movements becoming tinged with panic as he tried and failed, again and again, to dislodge his opponent. Muzluk held on, putting every effort he had into it, till finally, his fangs snagged against the main artery deep in Ghazhack's neck. Muzluk felt with savage delight a warm spurt of blood spray into his mouth, and he savoured the taste of it on his tongue, as it flowed out past his open jaws and ran down his face, into his hair.

Ghazhack gave out a horrible, gurgling howl as his life departed, and he sagged, a dead-weight, down on Muzluk. Immediately Muzluk heaved him off, and spat out fragments of skin and nameless tissues, clearing his mouth in disgust. Ghazhack's blood had run into his eyes and his ears and his face and neck were slick with gore. Muzluk licked at it, savouring the heady flavour, revelling in the exhilarating sensation of victory, and he threw his head back, roaring into the rain in exultation and blood-soaked triumph. Shouting out a great, barking howl, and then another, he was half-crazed, caught up in a euphoric moment of accomplishment.

A slight, sobbing noise, coming from a pile of rubble, off to one side of him called Muzluk back to himself, to some extent.

Unfinished business, he thought, automatically. Grinning horribly, Muzluk turned back to the Rohirrim boy. His eyes glittered as he licked his lips.

"Stay away from me," the sprog told Muzluk, in a high, trembling voice, and it tried to raise its sword at him, defensively. With one slight movement, not even bothering to stop to think about it, Muzluk swatted the weapon out of the child's hands, and it clattered away among the rocks and rough grass. Muzluk picked the boy up in his left hand. He braced his leg up onto one of the fallen stones from the battlements, and laid the child down on its back, over his knee, preparing to snap its spine. He got a good grip on its neck in his left hand and with his right hand took hold of its feet, prior to stretching it out.

"Don't hurt me,' the boy begged. Pleading. For all the good that would do, Muzluk thought. Muzluk had learned for himself, and he'd learned it the hard way, that begging and pleading were never really much help. They didn't do you much good with other Uruks, and they certainly didn't make any difference to mad, crazy old Wizards who were intent on punishing you, making an example, for something they suspected you might or might not have done.

The blood that was coursing down Muzluk's right arm from the bite-wound in his shoulder made him slip, missing his hold on the boy's ankles, and cursing under his breath, he yanked him up bodily, letting go of his grip round his throat. It was difficult for him to hold on with only one good hand and Muzluk moved his arm up to support the boy under his shoulders, almost dropping him in the process. The boy squawked with fear and clung instinctively to Muzluk's neck. Muzluk prised him off, spitting with revulsion at the horrid, repulsive contact, and held him at arms length, debating whether it wouldn't be easier simply to dash the boy's brains out on the rocks where he was standing.

"I'm so frightened," the boy blurted out, and he began to cry. He went limp where Muzluk was holding him. Muzluk snorted. He had tried that one, as well. Just the once; Ghazhack had kicked him in the head so hard when he was down that his balance had been affected for weeks, and even now, he still couldn't hear properly on that side. Not resisting – Hah! Try that with another Uruk, or a Wizard, and –

But there were no other Uruks; there wasn't a Wizard. And Muzluk would be dead soon, in any case. The blinding realisation came to him that perhaps, at last, he could do, then, exactly whatever he liked.

Muzluk set the boy down, not un-gently, on his feet. The boy, boneless with fright sagged to the ground. Impatiently, Muzluk placed him upright again, and held him there, until he was able to stand for himself.

It wasn't that Muzluk was not hungry. He was, and he'd eaten Man-flesh, on occasion before, always enjoying it immensely. Muzluk, of course, had no qualms whatsoever about consuming prey items that he'd despatched for himself. Uruks generally look on most other species – of wildlife, and livestock, and humanoids of various races (a definition occasionally including other Orcs) – as prey in some sense, or if not prey, more often than not, as bait. Perhaps it was that on the odd occasions when he'd been hunting before, even as a member of a group, the excitement of the stalk and the chase and the thrill of kill had fully absorbed Muzluk's attentions, so that he'd never had a chance to get to know his victim as an individual. Not in a social sense.

To Muzluk's dismay, a knowledge of exactly who it is you'll be eating, was turning out, as it does for many individuals, to be making an awful difference to him. If he'd been an older, more seasoned Uruk, Muzluk would undoubtedly have carried on regardless and killed the boy outright at this point. It's true that the essence of Muzluk, as a general persona had existed for many centuries, and, during this time, controlled by his various Masters, he'd been impelled to take on a variety of Orcish physical forms. But between each of his lifetimes, there had tended to be rather little carry-over of actual bodily experience. This meant that as far as his present incarnation went, Muzluk wasn't old, and he wasn't particularly experienced; though fully grown he'd been spawned, through the dark arts of Master, less than a full year previously. Muzluk's instincts told him to kill the boy at once, but all the same he stopped himself, because he knew that he could not really intend to eat him. If not to eat, what purpose would the death of such a pathetic little creature serve?

Awkwardly, Muzluk tried to push the child further away. "Run along then," Muzluk growled at him.

The little boy curled up on the ground and recommenced blubbering once again.

"I'm letting you go. Go on. Bugger off," Muzluk said.

The child did not react. Muzluk stared at him, helplessly. The night seemed oddly quiet, considering the scale of the battle that was ongoing so close by, but Muzluk could still hear shouts and screams and clashings of metal off in the distance. The battle action was centred on the breach in the Wall for the moment, but he had no doubt that somebody would be coming this way before long. Another Uruk would sniff the boy out sooner or later, that was for sure. Looking about, Muzluk's eye fell on a rope ladder, lying discarded in the grass. It was one of the ones that his comrades had been using earlier, during the siege.

The Deeping Wall in this area still stood unbroken, and the great blocks of ashlar that had been used in its construction stood chiselled so tight and close that Muzluk would have been hard-pressed to push even a narrow blade in between the joins. The stone face was also sheer and slippery with rain – making it difficult to climb - and there was no guarantee that the top of the wall would be a safe place from other Uruks, in any case. The Wall itself then, would not do.

Muzluk took the rope ladder in one hand, and the child under his good arm and hurried the short distance to the point where the Deeping Wall met the natural cliff face of Helm's Deep. Throwing with his left hand, it took Muzluk several attempts to snag the grappling hook that topped the ladder onto a ledge that was high enough, and large enough to support the boy.

"Climb it," Muzluk told him. The boy shook his head, and clung, to Muzluk's astonishment, to Muzluk's waist and his left leg. Roughly, Muzluk prised him off. He tested the ladder once or twice. It ought to be all right, he thought.

Uruk-hai Orcs are not exactly built for shimmying lightly along branches in the forest canopy, but under normal circumstances, Muzluk could climb well enough if he needed to. What he was facing at this point, however, were not normal circumstances. Though he did not realise it, he was still dizzy and ill from the blow to the head he'd sustained during the forward charge, and loss of blood from the open wound in his shoulder had weakened him further. He was having difficulty in moving his right arm, and could not use it to support his weight. The boy, who Muzluk had finally bullied into holding on to him, as he carried him up the ladder himself, had, in his panic grasped a strangle-hold around Muzluk's neck.

All these distractions meant that when the first rushing swish of moving air wafted against Muzluk's face, he ignored it, and even when the arrow that had been fired at him from the battlements hit the cliff wall just above him with a reverberating wooden 'thunk,' before it rattled its way to the ground, he completely failed to recognise it, for what it was. The second arrow grazed across the back of Muzluk's good hand as he heaved the Rohirrim boy on to the cliff ledge, and even as he let go of the rope, in shock and surprise, the third and then rapidly the fourth arrows fired by the lone, surviving Elvish archer who'd targeted him from the top of the Wall found their marks.

Muzluk fell heavily on to the rocks at the foot of the cliff. A particularly prominent, upstanding fragment had caught him in the base of the ribs, and had driven itself part way up under his armoured breastplate. Finding himself almost folded double over the rocks, Muzluk tried to rise, but a wrenching wave of pain, followed by nauseating weakness forced him back down again. From the corner of his eye, high above him, Muzluk thought he glimpsed the boy's face, standing out white and stark against the darker cliff face.

"Throw the fucking ladder down, you idiot," Muzluk shouted up at him, and then, for the second time that night, he passed out.

The arrows had skewered Muzluk in the side of his neck and under his right arm. Though the shafts had been snapped off short by his fall, his landing on the rocks had driven them deeper into his body. As the falling rain revived him, Muzluk could feel the arrow heads tearing further into his flesh with every movement he made, exacerbating the more serious injuries caused by his impact with the ground.

Muzluk was light-headed with pain, and he growled and snarled, ferociously but ineffectively, at it. Panting with the effort, he pulled himself over to rest on his left side, and stared, dully, ahead of him. He knew that he was done for, and he lay for a time, there between the drifts of the corpses of his dead companions. After a while the rain stopped, and gradually, the darkness in the air around him began to lighten, perceptibly. Muzluk wondered, absently, whether he would live to see the dawn. Much depended on how quickly he was losing blood. He could feel his pulse throbbing painfully in the wound from Ghazhack's teeth, and a thin stream of blood was running from the open gash, into his armpit and then down across the dented breast-plate that covered his chest. He looked it vaguely, tracing the little runnel down across his body to where it flowed away among the stones. He watched it for a minute, lethargically, knowing that with it, soon his life would run away completely. His blood continued to flow. Muzluk continued to watch it a while longer. Soon he would be just another corpse lying prone amongst the fallen, and Muzluk thought about the waiting lines of his dead, who surrounded him, and of the White Wizard, whose scheming had done for them all. He felt a sudden twinge of irritation; this activity was quickly becoming painfully monotonous to him.

To hell with it. To hell with all of this. Muzluk pulled himself together, and hauling himself into a sitting position, he used his belt-strap to staunch the flow of blood from his shoulder. With single-minded determination he rose to his feet then without a second look, he turned his back on the Deeping Wall and the hosts of his fallen comrades, and he walked away from the dead and the battlefield, and departed the White Wizard's war. Shakily, he tottered along the base of the Deeping cliffs, making for the open grassland plains that lay ahead of the mountain trap. The pain that lit up his torso and chest was not much worse when he moved than when he stayed still; the agonising sensation seemed merely - different.

The landscape Muzluk was moving through sloped downwards, slightly, away from the mountains that held the Deep, and as Muzluk was crossing the first shoulder of open ground he came to, the earliest rays of morning sunshine rose up ahead of him, as the sun climbed up at the edge of the world. At that moment, Muzluk heard a great reverberating din, the sound of a Rohirrim battle-horn, blaring out behind him from the Deep. The call was shortly answered by a distant charge, the noise from a huge company of approaching war-horses, that came from off away to his left. Muzluk did not have to look back to know that with this, the White Wizard's battle, and with it, all of his surviving Uruk comrades, were utterly lost. Muzluk toiled on across the prairie, and he did not look back to see the final massacre of his people, but still he could hear their screams coming from the field of slaughter, sounding far-off and thin in the clear morning air. At length there came a vast, rushing, crashing noise, Muzluk could not identify the sound but it put him in mind of a great, angry wind in trees. He could not think what it was, but it seemed to last for an age and an age, and then after it, there was a lasting quiet.

Far in the distance, Muzluk had sighted a line of straggling scrub that he thought might signal a stream, or a watercourse, and although gravely wounded, he had used up the last of his strength, in making for it.

And until now, that had been the end of it.

While Muzluk had been telling the Wizard his story, the Old Man had started chanting, singing, at the ground, in a low, melodious voice. After a while, clean, fresh water had begun to pool up from the dry bed of the stream, to stand clear and limpid in the rocky pools at the bottom of the Muzluk's little gully.

There were ripples, in the still water, though nobody that Muzluk could see had tossed a pebble, nor had there been a wind to blow. The Wizard dipped his hands into one of the pools he'd created and helped Muzluk to clean his mouth and wet his lips.

"Death, is little more than a passing through a veil," the Wizard told him. "When all else fades, in the eyes of the spirit is seen a distant place, towards which one rushes, with surpassing speed. In a morning of bright sunlight, one draws ever closer to this unknown country, and the first thing to be seen, amid a haze of land and sea is a –"

"Long line of white waves breaking against a far-off shore," Muzluk said. "I've seen it, now and again. From a distance."

"Then can it be that the ancient tales are true?" the Wizard exclaimed, "that your people were once of the Children of –"

"Yes," said Muzluk emphatically, daring the Old One to make something of it.

"How many times have you seen it?" the Wizard asked.

"More than once," said Muzluk.

"What happens to you next?"

"He sends us back," said Muzluk, flatly. He then gave the Wizard a brief overview of his post-mortem experiences in general; the soaring, rising sensation of incredible lightness that he'd feel as he lifted clear from his body. The feeling of rushing movement, and the exultation that came with the all-too-brief sight of that fair, sunlit land in the far distance. Then the dragging despair that invariably followed, when he'd hear the foul, mocking voice of his Master, that would drag him backwards, ever and again, for confinement in another fleshly prison, and a further lifetime of enslavement. Muzluk however glossed over quite a lot of detail about the Black Pits, for the Wizard was very old, and Muzluk wasn't sure he would have able to cope with hearing about any of that.

"As to your fate this lifetime, who among us can tell?" the Wizard said, at length. "I would that I could tell you, and yet I cannot know."

Muzluk gave him a lop-sided grin. "I wouldn't worry about it too much," he said easily, "I can't know that either, can I?"

"I fear your time draws close, my friend."

But Muzluk had no intention whatsoever of going gentle into that good night. Not right on cue, at any rate.

The Wizard and the Uruk stared at one other for an awkward moment. Long seconds ticked past.

"Have you – any last words?" the Wizard asked after a while, sounding slightly uncomfortable.

Probably didn't want to be caught down here by any of his fine matey mates, fraternising with an agent of the enemy, Muzluk thought, but then he reconsidered. The Wizard was still here, watching with him, wasn't he? He could of run off and left him to it, but he hadn't. And there hadn't been many people who'd done anything like that for Muzluk before, and it was odd, but he was sort of grateful, even though here he was almost dead, for it.

Now, this was all very well, but there was however something that Muzluk had always wanted to get off his chest. Something that he felt needed to be said on behalf of all Orc-kind, by someone, at least once, as a demonstration to all those interfering busybodies at large – including key players on both, opposing sides - who over the years, had treated his people as nothing more than a brutish collection of faces-in-a-crowd, to be led and controlled by their Masters or cut down without mercy by their opponents. His people had been tormented and enslaved on the one hand, but on the other, were given absolutely no quarter whatever by anyone else. So what Muzluk had to say was more of a statement in general than anything directed at this particular old geezer. But Muzluk was onto the very last of his chances now, and after all, a Wizard is a Wizard. Given Sharkey's absence, this fella was going to have to do instead.

"Cock off, Wizard," growled Muzluk with some satisfaction. The old man's bushy, white, eyebrows raised in indignation and surprise, but after a shocked moment he gave the Uruk a slight, slow smile and perhaps this meant that he had not taken mortal offence, after all.

Muzluk smiled back at the Wizard, then past him, baring his teeth one final time, into the last of the evening sunlight. Muzluk's eyes dimmed as his spirit left him, as it rushed out of his body and on into the approaching darkness.

Muzluk died. And he waited.

**The End.**

(1) We're going with the Movie version of events.

(2) By which I really do mean: 'reduced by one-tenth.'


End file.
